Monday, March 30, 2015

Incarcerate me on the other side of the bars, and technically I’m a free man.

Anyhow, all your Thwonkoes will be de-nitted on Wednesday when this regular Monday blog slot blends a timewarp of two days with a time stamp of seven years for my 7 Year Bloggiversary.

Hopefully, I’ll be here to celebrate in style, but if I should meet with an ill wind, maybe I’ll end up celebrating in Harry Styles.

If he’s walking by my cell when I’m released — and he has that big trap of his open for Onely Directional warbling purposes — then I’m down through his spinal tract via his windpipe and away into Freedoms Yonder like Russell Brand sidling up to Sam Mendes and saying, "I'll be your Bond — only Bonder."

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Güüür’s gaze lofted over snorts of icy breath, pinning the Tower’s summit to the looming clouds like a dead, exotic wasp.

At last, the elves were imprisoned in their wretched library!

At last, the forces of darkness would ravage the world again!

A mighty roar rose up from the Orcish hordes, rattling chains on the Tower gate and unbalancing the Fey in their eyries.

On this chosen day, the prophecy of Wüürrükk-Thääärr would come true, and all grunted its name till their throats bled.

Güüür turned to Chieftain Wäöüüürr. “Before we hew limb from limb, and feast on the bodies of the slain, almost certainly shrieking and howling abominably, barbarically, I have one small question to ask of you, O vile leader.”

“Speak,” grunted Chieftain Wäöüüürr. “But tarry not about it. Like you, like us all, O mad throng of death and destruction, I crave heart of nymph and spleen of sylph upon my dinner plate, washed down with the brain fluid of saints — and a silk napkin.”

Güüür steadied his armoured form against the mob’s urgent thrust. “Why do the names of all our kind bear unnecessary umlauts? In this age of austerity and misery, if we are to tattoo ourselves to within an inch of our lives with our names — and the names of our ancestors — and etch upon our faces, armour and shields, those same monickers, would it not be better for the sake of Orcish resources to drop all the umlauts? That way we would have surfeit of ink, paint and blood, the better to daub our womenfolk and infants with the nomenclature of pure hatred.”

“How naive you are to speak of such false economies.” Wäöüüürr’s spear dug deep into the scorched elven sod. “The umlaut is our piéce de resistance, our icing on the cake, our hobbit’s corpse retrieved from the unfathomably ferocious dragon’s stomach. Forget for a moment the concept of our names being rendered meaningless without the pronunciation moderating effects of the umlaut, and consider simply that those two horror dots represent more than merely a linguistic convenience or pointer to those attempting to interpret our script. Our ancestors spoke of a time when the evil eye of Mordor glared out from its invincible mountain. The future was ours for all eternity, more certain than the syphilitic sores that ravage the groins of all our kind past the age of nine, and yet the forces of good overcame that mountain of evil, assailed it, literally bobbed on it, and in the millennia since those dark and dismal days, in our times of shame and hopelessness, one thing and one thing alone has been our guiding light, our hope! One thing has risen from our darkness, our emptiness, to rouse our spirits and fire our courage so that we could gather and march to fight this day — march and fight, for VICTORRRYYYYY!”

Güüür threw a wrist-stump to his chin and furrowed his brow with the plough of confusion. “One thing? What ‘one thing’?”

“The umlaut, Durr Brain! Do those paired dots not resemble the eyes of vicious wolves? Rogue wizards? Surly womenfolk? Evil overlords with a penchant for fine tuning their whims with unfettered violence and opportunities for mass buggery of all things holy? When we square up to our enemies and make bold our power and aggression, think how much less daunting and intimidating would be our appearance, our demeanour, our spirit, if each and every umlaut were removed from our markings, our names, our very souls! Those wretched elves would go ha ha ha, lookit the big, smelly orcish hordes with their risibly unintimidating names. We mock you with the galloping dipthongs of our lyrical vowel structures, tease you with the swirls and cedillas of our poncy scripts for your inability to muster even a couple of dots over your so-called proud names in your quest to secure maximum threat generation potential and all-round evident beastliness. Having removed these symbols of evil from your language and piled them yonder in some distant underground hellhole of torture and misery, you have wanked yourself an anaconda-like pearl necklace of doubt, an infinite string of apologetic ellipses to render your instinctive lust for hellbent butchery as hesitant as the follicle stimulating hormones of an angel’s porcelain-smooth pubis! So do your worst with your growls, your chants, your waving of mighty mattocks! We are elves: united in our love for gay apparel and pretentious song, pointy of ear and footwear, slight of build and mighty of lyrical tongue, and we cry ha ha ha ha, you clowns, you oafs, you dildos, for all your basic instincts are belong to us.”

Güüür’s lumpen head swivelled about his shoulders as rage threw his chest into a priapic erection of rib and tumescent intercostal. He cast his helmet high and turned to face the hordes pumping their fists to his rear.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Sometimes, even the best writing blogs have to down tools on the vogue creation and dig deep into the previously bucketed wells of stagnation to offer up a blast from the past dressed as novelty.

As I understand it, Stephen King pulled this trick back in the day on his Fear My Specs weblog when he posted pictures of his childhood hamster.

So, in the spirit of undead re-treads, here's an old post about an old 1st day of Spring to sit in for the one I should have written this morning to celebrate 2015's "All Thinges Refreshed" offering.

Enjoy it if you must, pay a visionary fakir to watermark your soul with it using only his breath if you have the rupees and can handle the respiratory whoopees...

22 years ago, more or less to the day, I treated myself to a Spring Equinox pamper moment.

To
celebrate the beginning of the solar year, I whizzed off to a sauna,
there to languish in the heat of a wood-panelled sub-Scandanavian
Nirvana. And write poetry.

Don’t ask me why I thought writing poetry in a sauna had anything to do with the arrival of Spring — it just did, okay?
As celebratory plans go, it was infinitely better than shaving my legs,
drilling my initials onto my teeth, or potato printing the runes from
Frodo Baggins’ ring on the inside of my epididymis.

Or was it?

The
moment I presented myself at the sauna, armed with my Winnie the Pooh
notebook and matching pen, I realised I’d made a mistake. Everything
about the advertisement for Lady Helga’s Finnish Titty Witty Loveliness
Bar suggested the dry 40 degree heat of the Sahara. Instead, I found a
steam-filled wet room.

It’s at times like these that you get to
discover a little about yourself, like “am I tenacious and determined —
or merely fucking stupid?”

Opting for all three choices, I
stepped into the steamy cubicle and took out my Winnie the Pooh notebook
and pen. Within no time at all, the pages of my notebook dissolved
into a cardboard soup and the only legible mark left by my pen was a
trail of 37 conjoined hyphens running from my fingers to halfway down my
leg.

That’s when the trio of tattooed young guys appeared from
out of the hot, almost sensually alive mist and inseminated me with
their innuendo. I’m no stranger to being the wrong person in the wrong
place at the wrong time, but back then I wasn’t so deft at being a fish
out of water (even though there was plenty of water around and I was
definitely not a fish), and instead of running away, I ended up spending
the better part of an hour trying to explain the difference between
Bukowsky and Auden. Believe me, if you’re ever offered a toss-up when
it comes to being discovered writing poetry in a sweaty wet room with
just the thinnest of towels concealing your dangly wanglies, you should
plump for the brusque and mocking rugby lads over the “we’re regulars in
this obviously gay sauna” guys every time.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Sad to say, but in my spontaneously off-the-cuff way, most of my blog posts are pre-prepared these days, much like the freeze-dried bat wings in any self-respecting vampire’s refrigerator.

But this morning, I write on the hoof.

Truly I am a centaur amongst metaphorically vampire-themed control freaks made clown fodder.

Something of a fever has paralysed the typically hare-resplendent boinginess of March.

Subtle things, little things — like having a tooth pulled by a kick ass Vietnamese lady dentist, experienceing total nasal surrender in the face of The Vile Mucus, suffering the worst excesses of The Disenchanted — and recalling the dullardity-pumped fizzog of StupidHeadTwatFace in the name of regular blogging.

Which reminds me, if ever one of your teeth is pulled by a kick ass Vietnamese lady dentist, may you not endure kiss of these words against your eardrum scant seconds after a whispered debate about the efficacy of the anaesthetic gripping your jaw like two octopus tentacles hung from a hook:

“Julie (that’s the name of the assistant, infodump buffs) — come and hold his head.”

I suppose I should count myself fortunate that Whirl Towers now boasts a new cat.

Not properly, not for real — in the wake of Geoff’s demise, I’ve inherited a leather sofa, which kind of precludes any claw-bearing pet owning opportunities this side of a clipped iguana.

Our new cat is a guest cat, shunned as a prowling feline mongrel by Girly of Whirly’s sofa-protecting sensibilities, but loved by Son of Whirl and me thanks to its smoothy purrish gingery-whiteness, ability to roll around upside down on any surface — and love of golf balls.

My house has been transformed into a zoo-cum-cattery-cum-meaow theme park.

Which is why I woke up this morning to find no pre-prepared blog post hunkering down in the Regular Whirlitude silo.

Yeah sure maybe also a mule an a few lizards too but then ya got puddin.

Whack em.

Save em.

Hell they dont matter right now.

Wombats is what ya want.

Ya gotta strike fast.

Like a snake.

Or Ali when he whupped Frazier.

Whack em.

Theyre weird critters but fast so ya gotta get in quick there.

Jus throw the guy wombats on the mule pile.

They aint no good for cheese.

Get a girl wombat an you milk her right off.

With cows an goats an shit ya gotta have a bucket which out in the wild means maybe a skull or if your lucky then an old can or something.

But wombats aint like that.

They don’t pack big milk.

So ya can squish the teat right into yer navel.

Then lie by the fire an dream.

Come mornin ya gotta purdy patty all soft an cheesy like that crazy Greek stuff or maybe a goat.

Toss all yer girl an guy wombats on the embers maybe throw in a snake or some lizards an shit an lay out yer patty by the heat on some skin or a bone even a rock.

Ya feast on the wombats like normal chewin like a real man even if they aint all cooked thru.

Yeah an maybe a lizard for puddin like I said.

Yer cheese gonna be real cheesy now real posh.

Like in a restrant when ya skip ice cream an get ya some bree an shit yeah all them crazy wafers.

Feast on that cheese like a real man.

Its got the carbs but ya know what its also got the kudos the magic.

Ya can look that wilderness in the eye an say LOOKIT ME EATIN HERE LIKE I WAS IN A POSH RESTRANT.

This aint jus survivin its stickin two fingers up at the whola nature man.

Struggs “All Man” Prepuce is the world’s leading authority on surviving in the wild. His books include How To Punch A Leopard, Breathe Like A Cactus, and Rattlesnake Or Drinking Straw? When he’s not surviving, alone and unaided, in the wilderness, he regularly lectures on the outdoor life at Universities around the globe, including Oxford, Harvard and New College Swindon. Struggs holds the current Guinness world record for opening 20 barrels of crude oil with his anus in 8 minutes and 23 seconds. Truly, he is Legend Royalty.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

I’ve checked every yardstick I know and remain convinced that my suspicions about everyone else’s screaming mardies aren’t just the product of my own reactivity.

Maybe there’s an epidemic or something.

Let’s see just how stroppy I can be with everyone I meet today.

From 9am till noon, I’m hellbent on fucking off the people I meet — and after lunch, I’ll extend this ingratitude to cats, dogs and babies.

Think a cactus is prickly? Try saying so much as a HELLO to me today and I’ll bite your bum.

Has your week been like this?

An onslaught of The Disenchanted, ironically sorcerer-like in their ability to hex all animal, vegetable and mineral matter with the spirit of unbridled misery and grouch?

I say we punch them all in the chops.

Then get a job lot of rubbish bananas and DOLPHIN the fuckers.*

As Spring prepares to clamber from Winter’s splintered fjords, it’s all they deserve.

*Bonus Feature: How To DOLPHIN a Fucker

1) Place banana in the palm of one hand and behold: YELLOW DOLPHIN. 2) Massage banana skin until everything inside is soft and squishy. 3) Slice off the tip of the banana as you eye up your fucker. 4) Think of Indy cracking his whip, take aim — and FIRE.

Monday, March 9, 2015

That wasn’t her real name, of course, but she espoused a philosophy with which I find myself frequently at odds.

This philosophy began and ended with ownership of a pencil rubber — because, yes, I’m long enough in the tooth to have written most of my early words in pencil, despite having sucked every last HB to death in search of my daily Lead fix.

Here are the top four things you can realistically do with a pencil rubber at the age of seven:

1) Throw it at someone. 2) Eat it. 3) Lose it.

and, critically,

4) USE IT.

StupidHeadTwatFace was far too well-behaved and sensible to entertain even the thought of options 1-3, but when asked, “please may I borrow your rubber?” would ALWAYS reply:

No. You’ll wear it out.

She was right, of course.

By definition, using a pencil rubber to rub out pencil marks will inevitably lead to its demise, in the same way that wiping your arse on loo roll gifts you roll of cardboard after roll of cardboard.

Rubbing out is what rubbers are FOR!

And, waitaminute Mrs StupidHeadTwatFace — you’re not going to use it for the ONE purpose its very existence depends upon?

This is conservativism gone crazy.

I have no problem with sparing the Green Belt from bulldozers or ancient statues of weird-looking Persians from ISIS vandals, but I draw the line at cretintellectualism for its own sake.

I’ve got this great idea, but I’d better not run with it now because it’ll be wasted, so I’ma gonna save it up for something really special, really big.

This is not to say that notebooks of ideas are bad and evil things.

Ideas can present themselves at any moment — up to and including when you’re wiping your arse — and there’s no excuse for not getting them down as they flit, because, seconds later, they’ll have flut.

And herein lyeth le clef.

All thoughts are super fleeting, and they morph out of control on a daily basis.

That’s why returning to an abandoned story or novel is always difficult.

The words make sense, the plot makes sense, and everything may be grammatically perfect, but the thoughtpool from which the words and images were dredged (and which lent itself to all the other activities of the day, like a harlot) will have changed.

People are different, the world is different, you are different, and even your oldest of chestnuts must bow to your present day juggling wherewithal.

So, yes, the words make sense — but, equally, they kinda don’t. It’s in this way that “saving up” can be counterproductive. Who “saves up” a newly laid egg beyond its 'phew by' date? Talking of eggs, I’m minded now to inflict a Swiftian twist on my observations, sidestepping gingerly like some Strictly Come Dancing cricketer-cum-Nuryev to slap the memory of Mrs Bloody Fucking StupidHeadTwatFace one more time. Like Walt Whitman’s His & Hers underwear drawer, the thoughtpool of the moment contains multitudes. Like the teats of the mile high goat that famously romped around the open roads close to Whitman’s crossdressing cottage, the thoughtpool of the moment can never be drained by humankind. Throw every idea at the problem immediately in front of you, and you will not, like Mrs Bloody Fucking Bloody StupidHeadTwatFace’s rubber, be propelled towards any kind of demise scenario or sucked forever dry of squirting capability. Tomorrow, a new day will spring from its own irrepressible a priori. (I know that isn’t a sentence, but I’m on a roll here — and it’s no cardboard one.) Changes will happen because they just will — subtle shifts in perspective and matter that permit new synthesis and prompt the tossing of rotten eggs into the bin. It’s the reason why the world was once leotard-free — and then one day, all of a sudden, there were leotards. Maybe soon we’ll even have leotard-destroying zappo guns. Life is weird like that. Point is — whatever pencil marks you’re making now, and whatever the thoughts behind each deft stroke of the tip, throw everything you’ve got at whatever you’re working on. The pencil may be gone by tomorrow, along with the rubber, the keyboard, and more tins of fruit than you should really stick in that Mississippi Meerschaum of yours — but the thoughtpool will fill to the brim once again. Because it just will.

Walt Whitman:

Whether reading aloud, sounding a barabaric yawp, or stripping to his chiffon frillies, this icon of American verse was always the ladies' favourite.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

She will shrivel all hope of prose and poetry as you reel in words from the ether.

Or regurgitate them up from way beaneath yer.

Now I have enraged her, and shrill abominations echo from the future.

“I am tired of typos and all things misplaced!Fix all before you send your words my way.Especially that Aor my brain will squirtfrom every suture.”

Her words pierce ears like javelinspruned back to ‘spears’and temptation’s muscle flexing lashmakes with a dash,run throughthe offending vowel.

And now the open window beckons,and words spill in to the void.

Or you fix up a coffee,have a shave,stroke the cat,ring a friend,eat a banana,pace around,give up,resolve yourself to read a comprehensive grammar guide, dressed in a straitjacket,have another shave,watch TV,bake a pizza,play Angry Birds,clean the kitchen,or any of those other things that begin with an unfinished sentenceor thoughtcaughtone the thornsof Little Miss Pedant’s grammar Nazi swastika horns.

She is the guillotine to the run-on thought,The Handmaiden of Should and Ought,Pay heed to her,and you scribblenaught.

Monday, March 2, 2015

The arts are unnecessary and should be aggressively hounded from the world.

It’s a message that always plays well whenever the chips are down and our backs are up.

Weird thing is, whether it’s making possible the closure of libraries and museums or promoting opportunities for inbreeding between all forms of arts-specific disincentives, it always seems to fall to the right rather than the left to butcher the arts beyond all shades of black and blue.

Classrooms play host to fewer artistic pursuits, universities offer fewer creative courses, the cultural lives of ever more people now come bundled in jars with sealable lids (if they’re available in the store at all).

It’s true: painting will never save the world.

Nor will music, dancing, nor even writing.

(Actually, writing will, so get on it, people.)

But an absence of art and culture will most surely damn the world.

The hard-nosed and brown-nosed may be content to swim only in a sea of greed and consumerism, viewing art and culture merely as hobbies for the idle or therapy for broken souls who don’t play by the rules, and for the moment, their pared-down view of what works for all holds sway.